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Mankind, in their arrogance, once thought they had conquered their immortal enemy: The scam robocall. Unfortunately, thanks in large part to laziness by cell phone carriers, they’ve been back with a vengeance in recent years. Internet-powered robocalling systems are making it cheaper and easier than ever to launch barrages of calls at millions of phones,…
Facebook has been taking a lot of heat for myriad controversies in the US, including its jaw-dropping data privacy screwups and allegations it is maybe wrecking democracy by helping fuel online echo chambers. But as skeptical as many stateside are getting of Mark Zuckerberg and crew, the company’s role doing damage in other countries is…
Scott Pruitt, the increasingly scandal-mired, climate change-denying chief of the Environmental Protection Agency, met personally at the agency’s headquarters with a lobbyist who later gave him a sweetheart deal on an apartment, despite denials to the contrary. Per the Guardian, admission that Pruitt and lobbyist Steven Hart had met for official EPA business comes after…
Wikileaks, the whistle-blowing organization which is now almost solely run by founder and fugitive Julian Assange from a small room in the Ecuadorian embassy in London where he is claiming asylum from the police, claims that one of its official stores has been taken down by cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase. The Coinbase store sold Wikileaks-branded merchandise…
Largo, Florida police detectives entered a funeral home in Clearwater and attempted to unlock the phone of a man killed in March by another officer at a traffic stop using the deceased man’s hands, the Tampa Bay Times reported. Victoria Armstrong, the fiance of late Linus F. Phillip, told the paper she felt “so disrespected…
Donald Trump’s administration is considering invoking sweeping wartime powers to pump up coal and nuclear power plants that are losing out against competitors in the natural gas industry. Per Ars Technica, the White House is considering two ways to boost the coal industry after being thwarted several times at end-runs around the regulatory process. The…
People have long accused Verizon and AT&T of abusing their market share to the detriment of the overall wireless market. But the two may have crossed a legal line: The Justice Department has reportedly launched an investigation into alleged collusion by Verizon and AT&T to make switching carriers more difficult than necessary. According to The…
A state appeals court in Texas has struck down a 2015 revenge porn law, arguing that it was written too broadly and infringed on free speech protections. The law made it a misdemeanor in the state to post intimate photos of someone online without their consent. Defendants would be charged with up to a year…
It’s Friday, and that means you’ll soon get some sleep, wake up refreshed, pour a cup of Joe, and finally read Paul Ford’s 38,000-word article about coding from 2015. But wait, Facebook just stepped in and dropped its new data policy. And now that it’s a full 1,500 words longer, you’re going to want to…
Citing accusations of ties between Kaspersky Labs and Russian intelligence, Twitter has moved to ban the Moscow-based security and antivirus provider from continuing to advertise on its platform. “This decision is based on our determination that Kaspersky Lab operates using a business model that inherently conflicts with acceptable Twitter Ads business practices,” a Twitter spokesperson…
On Friday, SunTrust bank announced it was offering identity protection services at no charge to all of its clients in the form of Experian IDnotify. Perfect timing, as the company also announced—in the very same press release—a possible data breach affecting approximately 1.5 million customers. According to the press release, the potential data breach was…
The Democratic National Committee (DNC) filed a lawsuit in federal court on Friday alleging the Trump campaign conspired with WikiLeaks and the Russian government to sow chaos during the 2016 election and advantage Trump in the race for the White House. DNC Chair Tom Perez, in a statement published by The Washington Post, called the…
Two students at an elementary school in Louisiana were arrested on Wednesday for distributing child pornography. According to the Slidell Police Department, the female student sent nude photos of herself to the male student, who then sent the photos of her to “numerous other students at the school” through Snapchat. According to police, the students…
As you raced through your locker combination four or five times a day during high school, did you ever stop to wonder how those seemingly random rotations actually worked to protect your lunch and textbooks? The lock’s mysterious inner workings were always hidden away under a metal case, but this clear plastic replica finally reveals…
This week, a Nasdaq Nordic stock exchange data center in Finland was taken down by its fire suppression system. But these systems don’t use water to quench the flames, so how can they knock out a bunch of hard drives? The answer, most likely, is loud noise. It wouldn’t be the first time this happened.…
After last year’s delayed iPhone X release, Apple is trying to snag a few extra screens for its 2018 batch of iPhones. Unfortunately, the company is apparently running into trouble with its OLED display manufacturing partners, according to a Wall Street Journal report. Apple has turned to LG’s display division, a leading producer of OLED…
In the dying days of World War II, a German sub was reportedly sunk near the Danish coast, but the wreck was never found, leading to speculation that high-ranking Nazi officials—even possibly Adolf Hitler himself—used the high-tech vessel to escape to South America. A museum in Denmark has finally found the missing U-boat, ending this…
The labor union representing Hollywood’s actors, singers and other media artists wants to make sure its members aren’t digitally manipulated into porn stars without their consent. In the most recent issue of its union magazine, the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) said it’s “closely watching the development of so-called deepfakes,”…
If we’re being honest, the best thing about TSA Pre-Check isn’t that you spend $85 to keep your shoes on when you go through airport security. It’s that, for a brief moment, you get to be a Have, filing past the miserable Have Nots in the general security line. Sure, some of them might get…
Last week a nerdier segment of the music world was abuzz with the news that an Austrian company Rebeat had taken a $4.8 million dollar investment to help bring its “HD vinyl” records to market by mid 2019. Huh? HD vinyl? How does one make the last analog music storage format (that people still care…
